randy newman,
still digging,
syracuse,
the sound garden,
tom
—
My music accruing days started when I received my first cassette player at age seven. It was a stylish, bright yellow Sony portable cassette player and radio. The very first tapes I ever played on it were the Toy Story soundtrack by Randy Newman and News of the World by Queen. These tapes would invariably became my only music choices for the next five years of my life. My brother, who I shared a room with, had the same Sony boombox that he would play his Space Jam soundtrack on, so we took turns, listening to Bugs Bunny and D’Angelo one moment, and Freddie Mercury the next. The only rest these albums got would be at Christmas when Bing Crosby and Alvin and The Chipmunks cassettes were in heavy rotation, so naturally they soon began to wear out. To compensate, we discovered we could use blank tapes to record the originals using one player to play the tape and the other to record it. After that we found out that we could make mix tapes by recording the radio. We recorded imaginary talk shows. I wrote and recorded original scores for Jurassic Park and Mrs. Doubtfire with a recorder I bought for music class, I even drew and colored little pictures and album artwork to accompany my homemade tapes.
Even with such limited resources, I became fascinated with the idea that music and sound could be so diversely and accessibly recorded, compiled, and packaged, even so far as to influence the impact of the music itself. I never recorded something to tape over it later, I wanted to catalog each piece of music and commit it to my memory. I wanted to be able to listen to a song over and over so that I could sing it on the school bus, or while I was sitting on the bench during a baseball game. I wanted music to be portable through memorization, so that it could be applied to all times and places, in this way, it was relatable and malleable to me.
Because I grew up largely unexposed to a diverse range of music, nonetheless during the steady rise of the shopping mall, I never knew that independent record stores formally existed. Media Play was down the street and I would ride my bike there, mostly to look at the tapes and CDs, to image what they sounded like by what the packaging looked like. Having no knowledge of taste outside my immediate collection, (which now included Will Smith, Elton John, and a sampler CD I sent away for using Hi-C juice box POPs) and a cornucopia of Celine Dion and Cat Stevens that made up my mother’s CD collection, and having no money to buy anything, I started gaining a taste for music by what most of my friends liked. This was a problem. I found myself becoming lazy with music and liking certain bands or artists simply because my friends did, and this resulted in a musical identity crisis that lasted throughout most of my adolescence.
I really owe my entire individual listening foundation to one record store in downtown Syracuse which I visited with a friend after stopping by a science museum in Armory Square. I was 14 when The Sound Garden first mesmerized me; I hadn’t seen anything like it before. From the moment of entrance the two-story store was a portal of discovery, an oasis of culture and creativity, and a place that I wanted to embody. A smattering of posters concealed the walls, rows and rows of CDs and records featuring artists and artwork I had never heard or laid eyes on before greeted me, the smell was similar to that of a library, and I treated it as such, going in and sampling everything that looked worthy of a listen, and learning that I no longer had to judge a book by its cover or try so hard to like something that I didn’t. Even if I couldn’t buy anything, I was welcomed to engage and indulge myself in the selection that was there, which was massive.
The Sound Garden remains my favorite record store, even after visiting so many great shops in much larger cities, not only because of its first influence on my musical life, but because of its relentless devotion and integrity to selling the most diverse range of music, from well-known, Grammy-winning artists to the most obscure punk or indie rock. You can still to this day head down to Armory Square, walk into The Sound Garden, (which has its roots at a parent store in Baltimore) and find a new release or dig up any number of used selections, both at discounted and affordable prices.
Record Stores have accounted for dozens of other similar stories and experiences, as they account for a most important thread in the fabric of the independent music industry and its subsequent culture, which is forever tied to any social or political movement in the last century, and then some. Record stores should be celebrated, not only because they serve as the liaisons to the wide range of musicians and artists, but because they serve as cultural epicenters to the public and the represent a most immediate and accessible force of artistic influence in our world today. Plus, if it wasn't for record stores, I'd still be digging in my parents basement after all these years, and all I'd find would be tattered copies of the Grease soundtrack and Bob Seger best-ofs.
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